Total War History

Total War History, formerly known as Total War - Alternate Reality, is a non-profit semi-educational project that began on September 4, 2012 when the Wikia user Saving Private Ryan, a history buff and video game player, decided to make a wiki based around the "Total War " series of strategy games, focusing on the alternate histories that he and the game worked together to create. However, the wiki eventually expanded to include real history and other video games, as well as some original projects. The website was founded as a fun project for a video game series, but it took off as a semi-educational history website, mixing actual history, video games, films, popular culture, original creations, literature, and other forms of art into a different type of history, a "Total War History".

Foundation
Total War History originated as "Total War - Alternate Reality Wiki", which leaves its legacy as the website URL, "totalwar-ar.wikia.com". It was created on September 4, 2012 by the Wikia user "Saving Private Ryan", who was a fan of historical video games. He decided to create a wiki based on the Total War series, specifically Empire: Total War, which was released in 2009. An avid Steam user, Saving Private Ryan wanted to create a website similar to other alternate reality websites, but he wanted to use his experience as a Saving Private Ryan Wiki, Godfather Wiki, and Wikipedia editor to create his own, easy-to-manage website. From that, "Total War - Alternate Reality Wiki" was born.

Development
The first few pages on the wiki were related to the first chapter of the Empire: Total War "Road to Independence" series of campaigns, namely the Anglo-Powhatan War of the early 17th century. In September, only "Empire: Total War" faction flags were added, but on October 10, 2012 the "Cherokee Territory" page was added, the first page on the wiki. The wiki expanded from there, and evolved to include Total War: Shogun 2, the second Total War game that Saving Private Ryan bought on Steam. Later, he got Napoleon: Total War, and he was able to create articles from all of the newer Total War games at the time. The pictures in his articles came from a process in which screenshots would be taken ingame with the F12 key, pasted on a Microsoft Word document after the game was closed, cropped down to the necessary parameters, pasted into an MS Paint picture, and saved as a PNG file. The files would then be uploaded to the wiki, coming directly from his game. The information in the articles came from the games, with perhaps a tinge of outside sources if they were historical figures.

Expansion
However, the website expanded to have articles from other video games, such as when he began to add some articles based on the Samurai Warriors series to give backup to his Shogun 2 articles. This helped to create a web between the Sengoku Jidai articles, and the wiki expanded to include several more video game series afterwards. These included Dynasty Warriors, Call of Duty , Assassin's Creed , Age of Empires , and any other historical video game series. Later, the wiki went on to include some historical/historical fiction movies, and it became a hub of all sorts of historical materials. It was a single-person leisure time project, and in 2015 it reached over 10,000 pages.

Restructuring and Change to "Total War History"
The wiki went through some restructuring as a result of the addition of historical pages. Several pages were purged in a sweep of contradicting pages, with too far-removed pages such as an alternate history of Kentucky being deleted to make room for a real version of the state and a Spanish-American War page about a war between the United States and Spain in the early 19th century being deleted to make way for the actual 1898 war. The wiki was changed into a more realistic wiki, and soon it ceased to be a purely "Total War" series wiki, as evidenced by the Assassin's Creed Unity -inspired wordmark on 4 December 2014. On 7 November 2015, the wiki was revamped and renamed, turning into "Total War History". The change was because of the need to include the other sources of history without keeping the name "alternate reality", as much of the wiki was actual historical information. Therefore, the wiki was moved to a new name, and from then on it was open to several sources of historical (or semi-historical) information.

Today
Today, the wiki has all sorts of articles from various sources, including video games, movies, books, television shows, or pages that were simply the imagination or rendering of the user (the pages were typically made as a representation of something, such as a fictitious person being invented to represent an event involving people like them, or a list of fake Venezuelan politicians under the fictional President Ramon Solano to help develop the alternate history made by Mercenaries 2 ). It was mostly a private website used by user Saving Private Ryan, but there were occasional contributors, almost all of them nameless. Many of the nameless contributors' articles were deleted due to their poor quality (the lack of any information, horrible grammar, pointlessness, or vulgarity), as Saving Private Ryan did housekeeping on his wiki to make sure that it was kept clean of bad pages.

Politics
As with most sources of current events and history, Total War History had some political influences. The wiki was made by an American from the state of New Jersey, typically a liberal state. Saving Private Ryan was an independent politically, believing in mixtures of various ideologies. For example, he believed in secularism in all countries (no country would be ruled by religious law or theocrats), pluralism (all religious faiths would be welcome in any country), social democracy (the reforming of capitalism), some socialist policies (like giving everyone in America an equal chance of being able to achieve success), some conservative policies (like not giving amnesty to illegal immigrants, continuing to keep illegal drugs like marijuana and cocaine illegal, and the need to remain a superpower and a military force), some liberal policies (like allowing abortion, interracial and same-sex marriage, and the support of small businesses), and some nationalist policies (like supporting the independence of Israel, Tibet, the reunification of Ireland, and the autonomy of Kurdistan). He was not biased when making his articles about real politicians or organizations, although his opinions were certainly influenced by his independent belief system). The wiki did, however, take a hostile stance towards the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Ku Klux Klan, and other terrorist groups, while it took a friendly stance towards democracies and populist states.